During last week’s SIGGRAPH convention in Vancouver, Shotgun Software, an Autodesk company, announced the winners of its annual Pipeline Awards, honoring outstanding achievement in pipeline tool development. This year’s winners highlight the best pipeline innovation around the world, with teams from the UK, Australia, South Korea, and the Netherlands all showing their workflow ingenuity.

This year’s Pipeline Award winners are:

UTS Animal Logic Academy for Turret (Sydney, Australia): Turret connects Shotgun and Pixar’s Universal Scene Descriptions (USD) to create a lightweight file resolver architecture that works across a range of content creation applications. Turret has been the cornerstone of the studio’s USD-based system plugin and has transformed overall workflow by pushing the latest data out automatically rather than requiring artists pull data manually. By assembling their scenes using Pixar USD with Shotgun to handle file abstraction and versioning, this educational facility has combined learning about cutting edge pipeline technology with building a system that allows them to rapidly author content and track it in Shotgun.

4th Creative Party for LAEL (Busan, South Korea): LAEL is a dashboard where artists, production teams, TDs, and support staff can manage data associated with the projects they are working on. It provides artists an in-context view into the work that’s assigned to them, as well as easy access to associated files and metadata they need to do their job well. Production and support teams have access to a rich set of functionalities that provides a simple, robust way to manage file ingestion and client deliveries, and TDs have everything they need to manage the structure of a project on disk at their fingertips.

Zoho Studio for Shotgun Slate (Rotterdam, Netherlands): Acting as a digital slate, this tool records on-set data during shoots and pulls shot data from Shotgun to efficiently fill out the slate with key information like camera type, lens, and focal length. The slate itself runs on an iPad and is captured for each plate shot, and then stored within Shotgun. Shotgun Slate offers an effective way to manage many plates, significantly speeding up the process on set.

Territory Studio for Territory Toolkit (London, UK): Territory Toolkit is a set of plugins for Adobe Creative Suite and Cinema 4D, giving Territory’s motion graphics artists a Shotgun-based structure and level of control directly within their chosen application. While VFX applications like Maya and Nuke are already supported by Shotgun, this proprietary tool bridges the gap between Territory’s VFX and motion graphics teams, allowing for smooth transition between all of the DCC apps the studio uses, and eliminating problematic and time-consuming manual data-entry.

“Now more than ever, amazing pipelines are game changers for our clients. These toolsets not only automate repetitive tasks to maximize artist’s creative time, they actually help artists reach beyond what they could do on their own before - literally giving them the ability to contribute more and better creative to a project,” said Don Parker, VP/GM for the Shotgun family, Autodesk. “It has always been Shotgun’s mission to help pipeline creators design and build pipelines as efficiently as possible, and it’s amazing to see another year of inspiring tool development. We’re honored to celebrate the tools and their builders again this year.”